On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 09:44 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:34:20AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
> They use Linux/Unix because "somebody told them so", they program in
> Fortran, Cobol, Algol or Modula, because "somebody told them so", they
> do something "this way" because they don't know better and don't
"want
> to know better".
That's a bit of oversimplification.
I've worked in such an environment for
many years, I know what I am
talking about.
An anecdote: I once met an EE-professor, who, when being asked why they
were using Fortran answered: "Because our simulations are based on the
Fortran punch cards I wrote during my PhD thesis 25 years ago".
Consequently, his students and employees were programming Fortran.
In general scientists do coding
just fine but don't want to do more nor even think about it (no
packaging, no thoughts on system administration...).
Well, in 90% of all such
cases, "their coding" goes into implementing
complex algorithms, while their programs complexity is not much
different from "hello world".
However there
are IT people working together with scientists who do system
administration well.
Still the needs are specific and very different from other
environments.
I can not disagree more.
These guys relation to programming / sys-administration is not much
different from that of a 14-year old kid, whose IT skills are "browsing
the web, running games, playing mp3s and using word processors", when it
had a course in "programming in C" at school, and then starts to
discover the subtleties of programming afterwards.
Ralf